Michael T. Motley

Michael Motley Portrait

Position Title
Professor Emeritus

175 Kerr
Bio

Education

  • Michael T. Motley, Ph.D. , earned his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University.

About

Dr. Motley conducts research concerned with the interpersonal tactics and message strategies that individuals use in the context of problematic social interactions - for example, sexual harassment, unrequited romance, sexual aggressiveness/date rape, verbal sexual coercion, and related matters. He has also applied his interest in language use to legal consulting, serving as an expert witness on the question of how people are most likely to interpret messages in particular warning labels, advertising, contracts, instructions, waivers, and so forth. Dr. Motley is best known for his work on laboratory-induced slips of the tongue (e.g., Freudian slips) as a source of information on the cognitive processing of speech. He won the 1987 and 1990 Aubery Fisher Award for the best article in Western Journal of Communication, and was runner-up in 1988. He has been recognized by the field as being among the "Top 1%" of the discipline's scholars in research productivity during the 1980's and 1990's. He has been an associate editor for several journals and has held several offices within the National Communication Association and Western States Communication Association. Professor Motley has taught both graduate and undergraduate level courses concerned with interpersonal communication, language, message strategies, and empirical research methods.

 

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